Thanks for this, Olympia Snowe. It would have been far more helpful for you to come out with this four or five months ago, but I suppose we'll take what we can get. Not that I think it will influence this Congress to fix anything if the Supreme Court tears a huge gaping hole in the Affordable Care Act, you understand.
Former Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, became the latest lawmaker involved in the drafting of President Obama’s health care law to undermine the case against the legislation currently being considered by the Supreme Court. In an interview with the New York Times, Snowe, who left office in 2013, said that the language at the heart of the suit was perhaps the product of “inadvertent language” and “never part of our conversations at any point.
”The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, King vs. Burwell, say a phrase in the law -- “established by the state” -- means that only those participating in exchanges set up by the states have have access to federal tax subsidies to offset their premiums. Currently, residents in the 34 states that did not chose to set up their own exchanges have access to the subsidies through a federal exchange marketplace, which plaintiffs say contradicts the four words in question.
However, Snowe said that having the subsidies available only to those using the state exchanges was “never part of our conversations at any point.”“Why would we have wanted to deny people subsidies? It was not their fault if their state did not set up an exchange,” she said.
You would think this is obvious, but thanks to the Billionaire Buck Brigade, it's sitting in front of the United States Supreme Court.
